We’re still working on Exodus 22:24, Leviticus 25:36-37 and
Deuteronomy 23:20.
When you loan silver to my people, to the poor with you,
you shall not be urgent with him and you shall not place neshekh on him.
Do not take neshekh from him or ribit, you shall fear
your Gd and your brother shall live with you.
You shall not give your money to him by neshekh or your
food by ribit.
You shall not impose neshekh on your brother of silver or
food or anything that can be the subject of neshekh.
We now know that neshekh is a lender’s fee, not necessarily
the sort of interest we pay on our cars or houses.
I said at the end of the last discussion that a person might
bond himself out for a day here and there if he needed spending money, and I
said this fed into today’s topic.
It’s ribit.
The translation of ribit should be “unequal deals.”
This means two people agree to a deal but one gets more out
of it than the other.
The classic situation is two people agree to help each other
with field work on their farms. It is
only an equal deal if they are working on the same crop, at the same stage of
growth, requiring the same sort of care, and the two crops are of equal
quantity.
If farmer A gets help on barley but farmer B doesn’t ask for
payback until it’s time to work on wheat, they need different amounts of energy
to work on them. If A and B exchange
services on barley, A may have a more scanty crop requiring less work than B’s
crop.
The rabbis say what they should do is pay each other at the
going rate for that day. Then if there
turns out to be a glut of workers on the market, the farmer getting help that
day pays less, but it’s no different from what the other farmer would get if he
hired himself out that day to some third farmer.
The phrase “food by ribit” means you can’t exchange barley
for wheat or good wine for bad. The
classic situation is that if a man agrees with a baker to give wheat in
exchange for prepared bread, but the wheat isn’t grown yet, that is potentially
ribit. When the time comes that the
baker would normally get the wheat, if the crop has been destroyed, the man on
the other end of the agreement might try to get the baker to accept barley. But bread made from barley doesn’t sell for
as much as bread made from wheat, so the baker comes out on the short end. All the more so as the man might try to
substitute wine, which the baker can’t use at all.
In short, bartering of services or products has to be done
very carefully to make sure everybody comes out the same. For next week read Leviticus 25:17 and we’ll
discuss the last form of financial bad behavior.
© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved
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